Celifornia.com blog

Hi

Long time no updates, I am really sorry for that. Life has turned upside down since the recent move. It has been a month now, so we are in the calming stage already, and hopefully I will have more time to maintain the blog.

But just to give you an update, I have already started building my newest and first to Dubai project, a HTPC aka Home Theatre PC.

We purchased a Sharp Aquos 32″ LCD TV, which is small, but perfectly fits in size to our anyways small apartment. But since a TV by itself is just plain boring, I went looking for options. And of course added the fact that I am an Apple geek, I had to go down the proper, Apple road.

After having read extensive amount of articles about options, I have decided to go with a Mac Mini as the head unit, and it will be wired to the LCD TV via HDMI to DVI cable for best quality. I will have internet, emails, iTunes music and videos, and of course DVD and “other” video playback. This will become our entertainment centre, and to have the best control over all this, I purchased a Belkin MediaPilot keyboard, which is wireless, has a mouse built in with an intelligent Remote Controller on board. So one device will drive it all.

This was just a teaser, stand by for the outcome. I ordered via Amazon to a US address to eliminate the horrific UAE and in general non US Apple prices. There is a company called Aramex who provides a US shipping address, I ship everything there, and they forward it to the UAE, to our doorstep.

More later cheers, I am off picking up my wife from her lunch gathering…

Ben

Hi

Just a quick post that we safely arrived to Dubai. I am unable to write much, as our life seems to have fallen apart by the overwhelming amount of things we need to take care of. So far, I thought there is no more bureaucratic country than Hungary, but with our luck, we managed to find one.

An example just to wet your appetite, I got my SIM card 6 days ago with the promise that “It will be active in 2 hours sir!!!”, and yet, I am still without a phone. Go figure, that is Dubai for you.

Having said that, we are still enjoying it a lot, and we appreciate all the things we are presented with in Dubai. The weather is a bit too hot, feels much like having a hair dryer blowing directly to your face constantly when you are on the street, but its still somewhat pleasant.

We just have found a place to live at, in the Greens, which is an area very close to my office, and we will move in next week, once we bought all the necessary furniture.

This is what the flat complex looks like where we have the rental place:

Its a relatively nice place with lot of Green areas, which is why its called the Greens. Momo, our dog will join us on the 10th of June, she is coming with a Lufthansa flight booked as cargo, which is what Dubai requires. So from the 11th of June, we are back to normal with all the crew onboard

What’s left still is buying cars, opening bank accounts, and discovering Dubai Stay tuned, there is more to come….

Hi,

So you’ve heard the news already right? No surprise to you? Well, believe me it was hard enough to keep it confidential, but since it had to be kept, it was kept. So we are finally allowed to say it, we are moving to Dubai next week on Wednesday hopefully, depending on my successor’s training speed.

We were thinking about this move from Late December 2007, and it was only decided finally in April, 2008. Yuka and I are going there next week, and Momo, our dog will join us in mid June, by which we are hoping to have a rental flat readily available for Momo’s receipt.

I will post here more info as soon as I get them.

Cheers

Hi

Having just returned from Istanbul a few days ago, I thought I would share this typical Turkish moment with you. I was standing on this large square in Eminonu, and all of a sudden the Mosque started to call out to the people for praying time. It was an amazing experience, watch the Youtube video. More on Istanbul in the coming days…

Hi

So finally the day has come, the Macbook Air arrived to Hungary. My mother in law brought it over from Tokyo. So that the bag wouldn’t get scratched, I also ordered a Fabrix case from Singapore, which I earlier mentioned, and she was bringing the two together.

As I don’t have much time now, need to catch an early flight tomorrow, I just thought of tossing out a few pictures, for teasers.

Enjoy, a full review will come shortly,

Continue reading »

Hi

Before you get scared of the picture posted below, its not some weird alien or a strange shot of the moon, its my Nephew in 4D. Yes, I am going to be an uncle pretty soon, and my sister just sent me the fresh 4D shots of the baby. She said it was an amazing experience seeing it live, they even have a video in 4D that shows the baby turn, yawn and even move his arms.

And click for more if you want to see another shot.

Continue reading »

Hi

NOTE: There is an update below in the text as Firmware 2 changed things a bit

If you own an iPhone, you know this. The built in Camera application takes pictures and names them IMG_xxxx.JPG, where xxxx is an ascending number starting at 0001.

This is to keep images named differently, so even if you put them all in one folder, all has a unique name, and nothing gets overwritten. Now this works great, up unitl you decide to flash your firmware, and upgrade. If you do that, this counter gets reset, and the naming starts again from IMG_0001.JPG, and on.

I am on my 5th firmware, so you can imagine the flustration. I have IMG_0001.JPG 5 times already, and need to rename them one by one to eliminate confusion.

Just recently I was wondering if there was a way to alter the Camera’s naming, and sure enough, I found the answer on a popular iPhone forum. Read on for instrucions if you are interested….
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So the 1.1.4 Firmware was out for a while now, and many have upgraded to it without any real issue, so I decided to take the plunge and do it myself. I was on 1.1.2 prior to this upgrade and since I had no problems with it, I kept delaying the upgrades.

1.1.4 has a few neat features, like rearranging the icons, and locating yourself via cell triangulation on a Google Map, but that’s all there is to it. The main reason for my upgrade was that new software is built for 1.1.4 mainly, and I wanted to be able to try them and use them.

The upgrade went fine thanks to the fine folks at the iPhone Dev team, Aviegas and Geohotz who all contributed to this solution. I used iPlus 2.0b which takes the freshly restored iPhone on 1.1.4 firmware, jailbreaks it, unlocks it, and does it all with no harm to the iPhone itself. The process is completely reversible, which make it a friendly solution should a hardware damage occur and I have to take the phone back to Apple.

Here is a screenshot of the About screen on my iPhone, you can see its on the 1.1.4 firmware.

Read on for further details….

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In our line of work, often time we deal with broken Hard drives, failed components. The obvious question comes to mind, what to do with a failed Hard disk? Should we just toss them into a recycle bin, and have the cleaners take them? Well, that might not be a very good idea after all, provided the technology that’s out there to recover data basically from any hard disk in any state.

What I chose to do might seem agressive, but gets the job done. I take a flat head screwdriver, slide it between the casing and the shiney cover, and pry it open. If you have the special screw driver for opening them, it must be a nicer process, but I dont have them. Once the lid is off, I just smash the “disk” into pieces, and then spread them to various containers around our building.

BEFORE

AFTER

I drove my colleague to the airport in Vienna this Tuesday, and had a real winter experience despite that we are already in Spring. It was the 25th of March, flowers trees are in full bloom, and a winter storm hit us.

The weather was already strange for the last week or so, with temperatures close to 0 at nights, and much rain throughout the days. On the way to Vienna, we had seen some clowds, but they were not threatening. A good 20KMs after the boarder crossing, it started snowing, a few flakes here and there. However, in a matter of 10 minutes, just as we arrived to the Airport, the snow started coming down really hard, as you would expect in the mountains on a nice snowy January day. I stayed at the Airport for an hour or so, and the snow was piling up quickly. I felt like I was in some winter wonderland.

And to put the crown on the story, my colleague was travelling to Dubai, to 35C tempratures.

I have some pictures, they are unfortunately not so good as I took them with the iPhone. These were taken at the beginning of the storm, and when I came out of the airport, I just quickly jumped in the car and drove away, as the snow kept on going strong and I wanted to arrive home safe and sound.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a real visit to Vienna without eating something Austrian, so we ordered at a local (to the airport I mean) restaurant some Wiener Schnitzels, a typical Austrian Pork or Beef dish with some pretzels. Picture attached below. Enjoy.

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